Hey everyone, this is Steven Robles and I'm so glad you're taking this course on how to set parental controls on your kids iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. In the course we're going to learn how to add a child to your iCloud family plan, how to set time limits on certain apps, how to prevent them from being able to change the passcode on their devices, restricting cellular data, and a bunch more. So here we go, we're going to dive in on setting parental controls on iPhone and iPad devices. So I'm going to be doing this on my iPad here, but you can do it right from your iPhone or even your Mac.
It's a little more difficult on the Mac, so I would encourage you to do it on an iPhone or iPad to get started. But this is hopefully a little bigger screen so you can see what I'm doing. So the first thing we need to do is set up the iCloud family. Now you don't necessarily have to set up an iCloud family to set up parental controls on a device, and we'll talk about that in a later video if you have...
more than six people that you need to be in your iCloud family. Right now, Apple only allows six people total to be a part of an iCloud family. It'll make a little more sense in a minute.
But you can do all these parental controls without this, but I'm going to start with this because it's the easiest way to set up and sync it and have all the features that you'd like to have. And so the first thing you're going to do is go to the Settings app on your device. Again, your iPhone or iPad.
One more word about iCloud accounts. You don't want to share iCloud logins across devices. Sometimes people think that this will help with syncing and doing the same settings or sharing apps. I encourage you not to do this because it's going to cause confusion with your messages and FaceTimes and all that. So always use separate iCloud accounts for separate people.
You can use the same iCloud account across all your devices, your personal devices, but try not to share iCloud accounts. So In the iCloud settings menu, you'll see this section that says Family Sharing. Now if you've never set up family sharing before, there'll be a Set Up Family option here on the screen, and it'll walk you through the process of setting up a family sharing plan.
If you have a partner or a spouse or someone else that you would like to share app purchases with or iCloud storage, I encourage you, you can do that here. You can add adults without parental controls and then you share purchases like apps and subscriptions and things like that. So you can add multiple family members.
I have my wife here, I can tell my parents, my mother-in-law, and now we're starting to add the kids for parental control. If you don't have the maximum of six yet, you'll have the option to add a family member. Now if you've never set up an iCloud account for your child, that's great.
Starting from scratch is sometimes the easiest. You can set up a new iCloud account for your child and it'll walk you through those prompts. I encourage you to do that. If you've already created an iCloud account for your child, that's okay too.
You can add that iCloud account to your family. And so when you add your family member, it'll walk you through inviting that email address. And you will need their device at this point where you can accept that family request. Now, once you've added the child to your iCloud family, they'll show up here.
And you'll see my son is right here in my family. And a couple important things, you'll see their iCloud account. And then at this point.
you can turn on the ask to buy option. Now I have this on for all of my kids' devices, all their accounts. This means if there's any app they want to download or in-app purchase, they have to send me a request.
And the great thing is that if they're in the same iCloud family, you'll get a notification on your devices and you can approve for them to download or buy that app right from your device. You don't need to be near them or have access to their device. You can do it totally remotely.
That also will work when they want to ask for more screen time in the screen time settings. And we'll talk about that in a future video. So I would turn on the ask to buy if you have that. Let's cover one more setting in this first video so then you're ready to jump into all the different parental controls. You'll want to share screen time across the devices.
This way you can have access to your child's screen time account right from your iPhone or iPad. And so to do that, And for the rest of these settings, we're going to go down to where it says Screen Time in the settings. Here, on the bottom of your account, go ahead and turn on the Share Across Devices option. And you'll also have to do this on their device.
This will be the last thing that you need to do so you have access to all those parental controls from your phone or iPad. So on their device, also go to that Screen Time section, go to Share Across Devices, And now you'll be able to see them on your device. Like you'll see here, my son is under the family section.
And when I tap his name, I can actually manipulate all the parental controls for his device from mine. Now one very important setting. that we're going to set right here in the first video is the Screen Time passcode.
So you can do this on their device specifically or if you've already set up the iCloud family in the sharing you can do it from your device remotely. But I'm going to go to Screen Time and I'm going to go down to their name here under family. I'm going to scroll to the very bottom and again you can do this on their device or you can do it remotely. The set screen time passcode. Right now mine says change screen time because I've already set it.
But you're going to want to set a screen time passcode. And what that means is in order to change any of the settings here in screen time, someone needs to know that specific passcode, which is different than the passcode to unlock the device. And that's very important. So your child can know the passcode to unlock their device so they can get in. But this passcode will be different that only you as the parent know.
And so even on their device, they won't be able to change these settings because you've set the screen time passcode. If you haven't gotten the iCloud Family Sync working and doing this remotely, on their device, go ahead and go to screen time in their settings app and go down and set screen time passcode or use screen time passcode that you see that option there. And that's where you set the four-digit passcode that only you know. And again, it's different. and the passcode to unlock their device.
That's very important and something you want to do probably right from the beginning of setting up all these screen time settings. We'll stop here for this video so you can get all your family and iCloud settings set up. If you have multiple kids, go ahead and set up those multiple iCloud accounts, creating a new one if they don't have one already, or adding it to your family if they already have one. And once they're all a part of your iCloud family and you've started the share across devices so you have access to change settings, Then we can jump into all the individual settings for parental controls.
If you have any questions, you can tap the button that says email me, and hopefully I can help you out and lead you to the next step if you get stuck. But once you've done this, you can go on to the next video.